Monday, June 25, 2012

Animism in the Guise of Ecological Liturgies?

In a meeting of the Parish Pastoral Team, I was informed of the pilgrimage of the Cross of the Sierra Madre mountains. This pilgrimage is aimed at raising awareness regarding the devastation of the Sierra Madre on account of logging and mining operations. Obviously, this is an ecological pilgrimage - something that is in fashion today.

I looked into the pamphlet and I saw a creative liturgical rite which disturbed me:

Let us greet one another and the whole of Creation with a morning filled with blessings from the Creator God. (Give room for the greetings) Let us now light our candles and honor the Spirit who gives life.

Let us greet the West which makes the life-giving waters flow. (A container of water is raised.) Mother Seas and Bosoms of Water, you quench our thirst, grant that we may be means for purity and wellness.

In our gathering, the Holy Spirit, the Life-giving Energy of God is with us. Together with all creation, let us praise him and express our awe and admiration for his Name.

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While claiming to praise the Holy Spirit (the Energy of God?), the prayers actually honor the spirits of nature which we call the "elementals" or nature spirits (which are actually demonic spirits worshiped by animists.

I remember the first reading for Monday of the 12th Week in Ordinary Time:

"This (the Assyrian Occupation) came about because the children of Israel sinned against the Lord...and because they venerated other gods. They followed the rites of the nations..." (2 Kings 17: 7-8)

2 comments:

Terrible chastisement from God! When these pastors should have been teaching the perennial Catholic Faith, and the worship of the true God, they're instructing us to worship demons! They remain in full communion, and no one in the Church seem to take charge. Pius XI and Cardinal Santos is greatly missed in the Church Militant.

The Immaculate One

All yours, my Queen and my Mother!

We ought to get back the dimension of the sacred in the liturgy. The liturgy is not a festivity; it is not a meeting for the purpose of having a good time. It is of no importance that the parish priest has cudgeled his brains to come up with suggestive ideas or imaginative novelties. The liturgy is what makes the Thrice-Holy God present amongst us; it is the burning bush; it is the Alliance of God with man in Jesus Christ, who has died and risen again. The grandeur of the liturgy does not rest upon the fact that it offers an interesting entertainment, but in rendering tangible the Totally Other, whom we are not capable of summoning. He comes because He wills. In other words, the essential in the liturgy is the mystery, which is realized in the common ritual of the Church; all the rest diminishes it. Men experiment with it in lively fashion, and find themselves deceived, when the mystery is transformed into distraction, when the chief actor in the liturgy is not the Living God but the priest or the liturgical director. - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Chile, 1988)

Do we still need sacred space, sacred time, mediating symbols? Yes, we do need them, precisely so that, through the "image," through the sign, we learn to see the openness of heaven. We need them to give us the capacity to know the mystery of God in the pierced heart of the Crucified. - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Spirit of the Liturgy )